Zombie Apocalypse, the Board Game

BRAINS! Zombies want them and Jeff Gracia has them. By day, Gracia is a software test automation engineer for Bose. By night, he uses his (tasty) gray matter to deal with the unruly undead, along with the more pedestrian horrors of designing a board game, like production deadlines and shipping costs.

How did a humble engineer with no game-development or design expertise end up with a six-figure haul? Here’s the backstory:

Game Night of the Living Dead

The project started as a creative outlet. Gracia’s college band broke up and a weekly game night filled in. But being a restless maker, he soon grew tired of playing other people’s games and decided to create one himself. Starting with a rough idea and “zombie apocalypse” as the theme, he began experimenting.

His first prototypes were crude black-and-white printouts and gameplay was a disaster, “Everyone died in a few minutes” admitted Gracia.

Unfazed, he redesigned the rules. The next session had a smaller body count. He partnered with a web designer named Zack Parks, whom he met on a message board, and the game improved steadily. With a little prodding from friends, the pair set out to bring the game to market and christened their company GreenBrier games.

Gracia and Parks had a rule set and general design, but games live or die on artwork. In order to be successful they needed to find a hungry designer in search of an opportunity. They turned to Deviant Art, the web’s largest and most active community for illustrators. They advertised for an unpaid illustrator with a predilection for zombies and received over 50 applicants.

The pair held a “design-off”, with the only prize being more unpaid work, goth glory, and a share of future revenues. Illustrator Ricky Casdorph won the challenge, joined the team, and started spawning blood-spattered characters at a furious pace.

Custom design software allowed the team to rapidly develop content. Photo: GreenBrier Games

Zombie Photoshop

As the team grew, so did the stakes. Gracia and Parks leveraged their expertise as software engineers to create a custom design program (think Zombie Photoshop) that allowed the geographically distributed team to iterate rapidly. If a prototype did poorly in a test, they could easily redesign. These new tools allowed the game design to evolve more quickly and it soon developed the patina of a commercial product.

GreenBrier Games invested in rapid prototyping tools to produce high quality samples.

The team decided to test the game at few popular conventions, but knew that printouts would look lame, so they and invested in steel-ruled dies — tools that look like cookie cutters — that cut through chipboard, to prototype the game pieces. Using those tools, they produced polished samples that looked like manufactured products.

Convention attendees played for hours. Many asked how much it would cost to take the prototypes home, a testament to the quality of the team’s production values.

Play testing Zpocalypse at a game convention

With enthusiastic responses from gamers, Gracia started contacting factories that could mass-produce Zpocalypse. But goaded by the founders’ wide-eyed excitement, the game design had ballooned to include hundreds of cards, dozens of tiles, and scores of miniature figures, all resulting in an impossibly high quote from manufacturers. “You’re crazy to have this much content” was the blunt message relayed by a game-industry adviser.

The Zpocalypse team quickly reduced the scope of the game by 80 percent, making their manufacturing estimates much more manageable.

Dawn of the Designer

Aspiring game designers used to have to wait to take their game to the annual Toy Fair in New York City and pray that Mattel or Hasbro would decide to distribute it. Today, Kickstarter is the kingmaker.

Green Brier Games set out to raise $15,000, but the excellent design, loyal community who had already played the game in development, and a tweet from nerd queen Felicia Day, rocketed Zpocalypse into the record books. The game is now scheduled for release this Halloween.

Kickstarter has a graveyard of games that didn’t succeed. What set Zpocalypse apart? Design wasn’t the only factor, but it was a critical one. If you’re thinking of bringing a product to market, don’t be a brainless zombie; add a designer to your team if you hope to survive.